Ok, I think we get to the point where we can close this topic, at least I can’t bring nothing more new here

1. This is good for community, customers, IBM and Sun – all around.
2. Plug-ins can crash the server, but only if they are enabled by the user.
3. The DB2 plugin is the result of a two-year-old partnership between IBM and Sun, not just something we thought would be neat to throw into the server.
4. We have to be able to line up support, indemnification, training, commercial licenses, etc. that are part of Enterprise offerings and customers need – again, not just something that gets thrown into the server for kicks.
5. I’m completely, totally, and in all other ways, interested in seeing a similar partnership with other third-party storage engine vendors, such as PBXT. I don’t see it as a double-standard to include the DB2 storage engine when the PBXT relationship hasn’t yet reached the same level.

Thanks for update.

Re: adding plugin into release:

As Baron pointed me, it is not perfectly safe. Plugin can have crashes, memory leak, memory corruptions, may initialize server incorrectly, etc

License/bug: while the layout is slightly different (initially confusing me), the license appears to be essentially identical to new style BSD (no advertising clause). The old BSD advertising clause was about any other mention of the product (such as advertising) should include the credit – that of course would be unpractical, Berkeley rescinded that long ago and everything is new style BSD these days.
So all is clear and good now, with thanks to Mark Matthews, Jeffrey Pugh, and Trudy Pelzer.

@Todd: I don’t care for conspiracies. I agree that adding plugins can be perfectly safe in a release version. I would also say, and you may well agree with this, that adding PBXT as a 5.1 plugin would be the single most useful action that would benefit many.

0. Shoulda been in the release notes.
1. This is not a built-in storage engine, it is a plug-in.
2. The plug-in is in beta/RC state (http://solutions.mysql.com/engines/ibm_db2_storage_engine.html), but will soon reach GA status.
3. It will be included in both Community and Enterprise releases.
4. We pushed hard to ensure this was released to the Community first – we want and value community testing.
5. Packaging with the server is a matter of convenience for System i users.

I suspect that the argument is being made in the context of, “if they made this change, why not other changes that mean more to me?” I don’t think that’s a meaningful argument in the context of plug-ins, but OK. I’m pretty sure that almost everybody commenting on this doesn’t use or really care about System i, and that – with the exception of the license discussion – nobody really cares that a plug-in for DB2 on that platform is being distributed with Community.

Too bad that it has to always be a vast conspiracy to undermine the community.

Specifically section B.

(b) Redistributions in binary form must reproduce this list of conditions, the
copyright notice in section (d) below, and the disclaimer following this
list of conditions, in the documentation and/or other materials provided
with the distribution.

Isn’t that just a rewording of the BSD advertising clause, which for years made it incompatible with the GPL?

There should be no reason to make bug reports private unless they contain client-confidential data!

Putting something new in a production release is an interesting decision. Omitting this from the changelog is even more interesting.

And still absolutely no word from Sun about this — still more interesting. I’d expect Kaj Arno to blog about it and explain. Perhaps there’s some internal debate going on.